Software Distributed Shared Memory with Transactional Coherence - A Software Engine to Run Transactional Shared-memory Parallel Applications on Clusters

Transactional Memory is a novel, promising approach for simplifying parallel programming and increasing its acceptance and diffusion. Until now, almost all the research work on TM has been focused on shared-memory architectures, while very limited effort has been dedicated to TM on distributed-memory architectures. In this paper, we propose an extension of the transactional engine DSTM2, originally designed for hardware shared-memory systems, so as to run transactional applications on the nodes of a computer cluster. The framework obtained provides a software distributed shared memory with transactional consistency whereby threads running on the nodes of a cluster can access a shared memory with atomicity and isolation. So the physical private memory of each node contributes to form a global address space accessible through programming statements having transactional semantics. The extension proposed is also useful for experimentally evaluating different techniques to be employed in a distributed implementation of TM.